OS X Mountain Lion users reporting laptop battery life issues

A number of MacBook Pro and MacBook Air owners who updated to the recently-released OS X Mountain Lion are complaining of battery performance issues, with some reporting their batteries only last half as long as when OS X 10.7 Lion was installed.

Since the first complaints surfaced in an Apple Support Communities thread started on July 25, the day Mountain Lion launched, the number of reportedly affected MacBook Pro and MacBook Air owners has grown to the point where Apple has supposedly initiated an investigation. As of this writing the thread, titled "Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion" now stands at 15 pages.

While most users are seeing battery life drops of about one to two hours, some cases claim performance has fallen to less than 50 percent as their machines are only capable of staying on for a little over two hours.

Community members have been trying a variety of methods to remedy the issue, from re-installing the software to turning off some of Mountain Lion's new features like Power Nap, but the attempts have yet to produce a fool-proof solution. Some members have seen limited success in resetting the machine's system management controller (SMC), though the battery issue crops up again after continued use.

Many users are reporting heightened CPU temperatures even when the machine is at idle, possibly pointing to a backend program management problem, while others are seeing battery drain when the system is sleeping.

The troubles with Mountain Lion mirror those seen when OS X 10.7 Lion was released last year. In that case, a huge 176-page thread was created regarding MacBook Pro battery issues and the problem is still unresolved for many Lion users.

Apple has taken notice of the most recent complaints and, according to one community member, sent out a questionnaire on Friday in an attempt to pinpoint the problem.

OS X Mountain Lion launched last week, bringing with it over 200 new features including tighter iCloud integration, the Messages app, Notification Center, Facebook integration, Dictation, AirPlay Mirroring and Game Center.

I did a clean-install of 10.8 on my 2011 MBA. Once nice thing is that WiFi is much better in connecting to my AirportExtreme access point. Before, when resuming from sleep-mode, I always had to turn off/on WiFi in order to reconnect. That's a big plus.

The battery life I'm still watching... I think it did take a hit and was not as good as 10.7. But not by much for what I use it for.

I am sure it is just a piece of code that needs to be fixed. It usually is just a little temporary issue. Always wait about a month when Apple or anyone for that matter when they release a new OS. Once the field has it, then we find out what the potential problems and Apple's pretty good at fixing it if it turns out to be a coding issue.

It's impossible for OS developers to test every possible scenario. But at least Apple does the quickest updates to fix the bigger issues first.

I had my first problem along these lines today. I opened it from sleep while it was connected to power source and the Fan spun up real high. After 3-4 minutes of it still running high, and I was just letting it sit there looking at the desktop with no programs running, I tried to see if the utilities activity monitor could tell me anything. Nothing was using the CPU and no data was going in and out of the network. Yet the machine was acting like it was working on something fierce.

Restart didn't cure it, but once I did a shut down and then a boot up, everything was back to normal.

Bloody typical! My first OSX upgrade (MBPr) & I waited for the usual issues that you hear about & heard/read absolutely nothing at all (read AI & another site daily) so bit the bullet last night. Upgrade went fine, then just read this thread.

Hopefully I won't have the problem but I think the battery is going down quicker tho no overheating I can detect so far...